This week the biggest struggle for me was creating my hack. Mariana and I knew we wanted to attempt to tackle a large scale problem in the world, but we also did not want to focus on one that we felt like a lot of other people in class would center their hacks on. Because of this, we decided to focus our redesign of a game on the healthcare system. More specifically, how broken and unfair the healthcare system is. We wanted to highlight how the healthcare system heavily favors those who are rich and insured versus how it is works against those who are less fortunate and uninsured. Health care is something everyone should have readily available, and this clearly is not the case in this world. That is why we wanted to challenge this system.

The biggest challenge we faced is what game we were going to manipulate to get our message across. Mariana had a couple decks of cards with her, so we thought it could work good to use those. We did not know too many card games though as we did not play too many of those types of games growing up. One game that we both were familiar with the rules with was “Go Fish!” The ruleset of this game is fairly simple, so it felt like it would be easy to manipulate it how we wanted to. Although the ruleset was simple, we ran into many problems trying to add new elements to the game. We would add new aspects thinking they would work and run smooth, but then realized they would not work once we finally did trial runs of the game. There were more elements that we wanted to add than we had in our final product, but just could not figure out how to add them and have the game run smoothly.

We also really wanted to reskin a game, but we were not sure how to reskin a deck of cards and have it actually change how the game is played or the meaning behind the game. Instead, we settled on rewriting the game and just changing a few rules and adding a few new elements to the game. We ended up naming this game “Go Fix!” The general rules and function of the game is very similar to that of the original “Go Fish!” Each different type of card represented something different. One set was a health issue, one was different forms of treatment, one was bad luck cards, and one was good luck cards. The goal of the game is to match your health illness cards that you draw with its desired treatment. We added a money system to the game using poker chips. This was incorporated so that some players could be at an advantage and a disadvantage at the start of the game. To play this game, there is one player who is the role of an “insured” person and one who is the role of an “uninsured” player. When an insured player matched a treatment card to an illness card, they had to pay 1 poker chip. If an uninsured player matched these cards, they had to pay 3 poker chips. If player drew a bad luck card, they had to pay 1 poker chip. If they drew a good luck card, they were add 1 poker chip to their pile. To win this game, a player must match 3 treatment and illness cards and still have poker chips left over. A player can also lose this game by running out of poker chips and being in “debt.” This ruleset made it to where the insured player was at a heavy advantage to win this game. Every time we player, the insured player one.

This game shows how the healthcare system favors different groups of people, but also how it unfair to everyone still.